A cartography of the Aztec Gods Pantheon

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be an Aztec jaguar warrior…”

South American and Meso-american civilizations have fascinated me since my childhood - when I would watch “The Mysterious Cities of Gold”, an early 80’s Japanese-French anime series. Solar-powered galleon ship, golden mechanical-condor, three kids exploring the New World at the beginning of Spanish Conquest and mini documentaries at the end of each episode. Who could ask for anything more ?

(Footnote : Hoping for a sequel ? Already done in 2012 !)

This love at first sight was revived when I came across Aztec codices : illustrated manuscripts with thick black lines, bright plain colors, fabulous monsters and animal-like deities. My passion for computers did the rest : hundreds of digital restorations piling up in my hard drive and shared on the Internet.

But with 2021 marking the 500th year since the fall of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire, it was time to switch from passion to understanding. Time to commemorate the complexity of the Aztec Pantheon, make the academic research more accessible to the general public and show how this civilization is still alive in our global culture.

“The Aztecs had many idols, and so many that almost for each thing there was one,” wrote the 16th Spanish historian Juan Bautista Pomar. “We cannot count the number of idols in Mexico. It is nevertheless taken for certain that they had more than 2,000 gods and that each had its own name, brand and office,” added Francisco Lopez de Gomara. “The establishment of an exhaustive catalog and an unequivocal classification of Aztec deities appears to be a totally futile endeavor,”, concludes the contemporary Belgian historian Sylvie Peperstraete.

Information is scattered, partial and sometimes contradictory but, thanks to the Pudding and its gifted team, we tried to embrace all of them to give you an overall view and the most extensive online map of the Aztec Pantheon. And we hope it will help you see this civilization with your inner child’s eyes, just like I did years ago.

Lost or tainted written sources

Until its rise as an academic field that strives for accuracy, history has been, by definition, written from a single point of view. Concerning our subject, we stumble upon a major difficulty: the Aztecs destroyed materials created by their rivals in order to justify the dominance of their empire. And Spanish conquerors and Christian missionaries brought about an even bigger annihilation, toppling Aztec society and rewriting their works.

Fortunately, some of these missionaries tried to collect as much information as they could, especially Bernardino de Sahagún, pioneer of anthropology, or even fought for the indigenous rights, like Bartolomé de Las Casas. And their work is still precious to historians.

Complex iconography: the examples of Tezcatlipoca and Tlaltecuhtli

Aztec gods, in iconographic sources, are a little like Mr Potato Head dolls, with important symbolic accessories added to their form (feathers and jade for nobility or power, walking stick for merchants, skulls and bones for the underworld, claws or fangs for sacrificial dimension, etc.). This explains the difficulty in identifying gods, even by specialists, as these symbols can be emphasized for a particular worship or switched between deities, if they share similar fields of competence. Thus, gods can have multiple disguises and share them with others, like a never ending stream.

Below, you can look at two examples of Aztec gods, Tezcatlipoca and Tlaltecuhtli, and their combinations of symbols which permit identification.